Sunday, January 24, 2010

The irony does not escape me that just when I thought I would call this blog a house wife's recluse I have landed with a job. A housewife-thats what I am for last 4 years ,and now I have a new job. I have been doing a housewife's job for last 4 years .A job with no job descriptin .It includes finding socks for kids in the morning ,helping husband by tapping at the bathroom door and yelling "guy hurry up , u are getting late" ,on the intelligent side I occassionally read out technical specifications to husband over the phone when he has forgotten an important paper at home. I have nobody to handover my housewifing to,I am sure nobody looks forward to swapping a job with a housewife.I did not acknowledge it before but come to think of it .......I loved my stint as a housewife.oh!!! i am gonna miss all that what never mattered to me before. My walks which i forced myself to but once out they were pleasure, pleasure and pleasure. reading things, cooking stuff , Even watching mindless soaps was not that bad either.I am suddenly worried about the half read books,the story I was to jot down which is simmering in my mind for so long, my baby blog, the movies which i though i would watch.but on the flip side I wil postpone house keeping for some other day and blame it to the new job and guess what !!!! this time there is no guilt.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

The connotation of the expression or feeling or misgiving of missing my man has taken a paradigm shift as far as "i miss you " goes . Earlier, in those candy flossy days it meant -I wish you had been around ......and now a decade and a half later it means -If you had been around .last week all the men ( one hubby and 2 sons) in my house went to watch FIFA club Football match and I was the self anointed queen in the house . don't ask me how I developed this feeling , it was the TV remote in one piece with all its channels to my disposal. so I did what any housewife worth her salt would do - plonk on a sofa and watch TV.It was a bit difficult to decide upon what to watch considering I have been a passive TV watcher for a long long time ,I finally settled down to watching SA RE Ga MA Pa and suddenly it occured to me I was alone , missing him .Now if he had been around , he would have watched news on NDTV or BBC or CNN during breaks and toggled between channels. so i did the same , i.e. try to watch 2-3 channels at a time .the husband community firmly beleives that watching advertisements is a cognizable offence under IPC section ^@#$, so they keep changing the cahnnels , in the process the wife community has to miss on some part of their regular mentally nutritional stuff of cereals (ooops serials) and then they have to watch the repeat shows .Anyway , here I was plonked on sofa watching News+Sa RE GA Ma.... enjoying(?) grave news from India like Ruchika case and Mattoo sahab's threat to Hockey team (BTW , why did not they make Mattoo sahab the CEO of AirIndia to deal with the pilots who fly between the two strikes ?He can do pretty neat job to threaten them rather than succumbing )and suffering the paralysing analysings of judges of the reality show following the songs.I wanted to have a good time so I decided to quit watching TV and brought a bunch of Hara Dhania from fridge to clean and beleive me I had a ball of a time.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

It shook my faith in humanity. scores of people ; two ministers of Tamilnadu Government ,one of sports and the other of health ; a collector and a convoy befitting minister's visit play bystanders to a dying cop on the road.
What a shame! we let a man die on the road when he is pleading and begging for help. His helpless hand raised and fell down. Why didn't anybody's human impulse force them to hug the dying man and tell him "dont worry , we are here" . The ministers were sitting pretty in their white sarkari cars clad in their white shirt and lungi.the cost of laundry of their white dress was worth more than the life of a policeman.
The criminals who chopped the legs of the policeman are caught but what about the politicians who allowed this man to die ? Ok ,forget the politicians , they are proven rascals but the common man ...? why did not any of the people around come to the rescue of a dying man or forced the ministers to transport him in their cars .
I just could not help wondering what must be the last thoughts of the dying man ?
I am sure he must be regretting to have opted to be a policeman to make the lives of people secure and , worried that if he was allowed to die on the road uncared for , who would care for his family after his death?

Monday, January 4, 2010

At the best and with utmost euphemism nostalgia can be described as an Obsessive compulsive disorder to travel in life with the reverse gear , a perpetual desire to take a trip down the memory lane.

To some the feelings of nostalgia is so chronic that they live in a state of denial of present , clinging to their past . So addicted are they, to their past that the ambience around them is consistently enveloped in their past.

Haven’t a song in melodious voice of Lata Mangeshkar coming from far has suddenly made you time travel to your college days when you watched the particular movie with your college gang , however lousy the movie was, you still have a smile on your face to think of it. In all possibilities you can still even name many of your friends you watched the movie with.

many of our Marathi Mandali, will be suddenly overcome with an overwhelming emotion by hearing the famous song from the movie Ashta Vinayak , “Datun Kanth Yeto….” (equivalent of BABUL KI DUAYEN LETI JAA....). many women would vouch to have cried listening to this song and have thought of their father , ask even women married more than 40 years now. my personal nostalgic high comes as soon as I hear mangalashtakas in any marriage and, my lachrymal glands almost instantaneously start functioning at peak.

I personally associate the fragrance of Johnson and Johnson powder with my children’s infancy , Summer vacation with grand parent’s old house where a huge dark and dingy room was specially kept for dumping old stuff, raw mangoes and children .
The windy march afternoons and ruffling of dry leaves on the roads still make me nervous and nostalgic about the exam’s time and the compounded tension and anxiety I experienced along with .

Some nostalgias are specific of certain generations , if we have grown up and evolved with BW TV , landline phones , our imagination was nurtured and flickered by Amitabh Bachchan’s movies and Doordarshan’s moderately entertaining and largely pontificating serials (they were not soaps then) , then it’s highly likely that today’s soaps full of wicked scheming women characters who are garishly dressed , wielding cells in their hands all the time , wearing make up even while sleeping are highly incompetent to keep you engaged . You watch those soaps to criticize them , ridicule them or to compare them with those of “our times” but never for its entertainment value.

Ever remember the romance of calling up your betrothed on the landline when probability of he/she picking the phone was one upon number of family members available in the house . As the customized ubiquitous cell phone made the clandestine phone calls obsolete ,the fluttering of heart while anticipating and hoping that the sweet heart would pick up the phone is spoiled .you may think that cellulars have made access and communication easier but surely would never imagine damning those good old days of calling up 5 digit ,simply itched on heart, numbers.

We all have uncles and Aunts in the family whose dialogue !!! ,(read monologue) , starts with ,” in our times… ” , however difficult those times were , the times bygone are always remembered fondly. An aunt of mine , now 92 years old , told me many a time that how as a ninth daughter in the family , at the age of 14, was taken to a village to show her for the prospective alliance(my uncle) . Once the groom’s family approved of the relation , her father singlehandedly married her off in her mother’s absence in the same visit telling that it was unaffordable for him to come all the way again for the ceremony . Aunty still remembers her times with mixed feelings of admiration and wistfulness.

Nostalgia can be a comfort zone, a refuge , a security blanket when we are unhappy with our present or trying to escape from the unpleasantness in day today life but, for most of us it’s a bridge between our past and the present .

I always wonder 20-25 years down the lane what all things we would be nostalgic about and would bother the next generations with all the trivial details of our times ,

To list a few –

In our times

(IOT)we had to ask our parent’s approval to get married.

(IOT) In our Times we did not have very good network for mobile phone, sometimes there would be no signal and we had to come out of the house to Talk.

(IOT) we would get parking place in the city malls within half an hours search during off peak hours

(IOT) we used to write proper dictionary spellings for answers in exams, sms language was looked down upon.

(IOT) there used to be quite a many youngsters and teenagers who would not have a bike of their own to go to high schools.